


Storyteller

by biggrstaffbunch



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 19:32:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biggrstaffbunch/pseuds/biggrstaffbunch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A tale is all in the telling of it. Rose spins the story until the truth is a complex thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Storyteller

**once upon a time,**

The truth is, Rose doesn't dream of the old life anymore.

When she closes her eyes and sinks into the black tangle of sleep, she doesn't tilt on the edge of some spinning Earth, clinging to questions that will never be answered, reaching for galaxies that will never be strung through a sky she will never explore.

Instead, Rose curls her fingers around her pillow, and 

**(there are five ways this story could go)**

_i._

maybe she lets herself wonder if the Doctor who left her behind so long ago ever thinks of her now. If moments move in the same way for him that they do for her, skipping in starts and stops, barrelling through seconds that ought to be stretches and slowing through minutes that ought to be glimpses. If perhaps, just perhaps, he gave her the Doctor with one heart because she was the TARDIS to his Time Lord, a link to the vortex in a way that lies like a sleeping wolf in the restlessness of her belly. 

Did he think that putting her hand over the product of a human/Time Lord metacrisis would be like plunging her fingers into soil, planting a seed and forcing a second heart to take root? She angers at his presumption, and her skin ripples around the memory of a song.

One day, she wakes up to find the Doctor of this world has stopped breathing. She thumps him awake, and he tells her he doesn't need the breath. His body is changing, and the space between her fingers is the distance that remains uncharted, unmapped. Her hands are the tools, the carver and caliper, and for once, she gets to wield the power she's always had. 

Oh--

 

_i(a)._  
\--when she laughs, the black space behind her teeth glows a crackling gold.

 

 

_ii._

what Rose discovers is that she has forgotten his smell. His smile. The subtle changes of his every expression. It's all lost in a drowning crash of blue, blue sea, blue suit, blue veins threading through the chambers of a heart that is so human it hurts. 

Behind it all, though, beneath it, buried in the long ago and the deep, there is an insubstantial shape of a man in a swinging overcoat, running along the hills of a futuristic New York. Shadows and smoke, and the word impossible glimmering in a horizon shot with twilight. Applegrass and cats and the terrible, whimsical ways the universes move.

She thinks that he has probably done his share of forgetting as well, forgotten the slope of her cheeks and the tenderness in her touch, the way her fingers slipped into his. He's had to have done, because if every tick of the clock is infitismally closer to the day she will die, it's still too much, too long to breathe while still remembering everything she's lost. All she's got is forty or fifty more years, if she's lucky.

Him, he's got forever.

 

 

_iii._

actually, she tells herself that she doesn't have much time to spare for the same old stars sleeping in her soul. That there are adventures to be had and people to meet and spaceships to try and build from scraps of the microwave and salvaged alien tech. She tells herself that she's already got a hand to hold and that the Doctor in brown lurks in her past, in the lines around her eyes, long-gone in the way of bone-felt pains that come with the rain.

Life has to be liveable, somehow, and so Rose learns not to dream.

 

_iii(a)._  
There was that one about Jack, though.

 

_iii(b)._  
Jack and a can of whipped cream, to be fair.

 

_iii(c)._  
For some reason, the Captain Harkness is as vivid as a picture, swimming in the dark. Blue-eyed and grinning, flyboy with a heart of gold and a clever sleight of hand, the sky to her sun and the orbit to the Doctor's moon. Always yearning, trying to pull them a little closer, merge them a little bit more with himself. But she and the Doctor never really shared beyond time and space and travel, did they? The pieces of themselves, the things that kept them whole. They gave so much to one another that there was nothing left over and then they left him behind, and so here Jack stands now, every night, broad-shouldered and smiling, and he doesn't ask for a single bloody thing and maybe that's what hurts most. All that she never knew to give. Everything she never had the chance to say.

She and Jack dance with goodbyes and ghosts between their bodies, his hand on her hip the only thing keeping her from tipping into the past.

"This here is something special," he whispers, and his breath is hot against her hair. He sings a little bit of Glenn Miller into her ear, and she whispers an apology into the everbeat of his heart.

 

 

_iv._

it's pointless to pretend that there aren't a thousand conversations that she stores away, systematically in the places where even telepathy can't touch, those doors that remain closed except when she needs solace within herself. And then there's just the way she arranges each scenario, just she and him, sitting side by side in a garden or a park or somewhere there's green, because green means life (unless you're Superman, but the Doctor was always a Batman sort of bloke anyway, the gadgets and the tortured past and the innate desire to be a bit of a playboy) 

but the point is, they're on a patch of land and they're saying things to each other, things that matter, things that she thinks of during random points of the day and then absently scribbles on a piece of paper, and then the Doctor in her bedroom will find the fluttering scraps and he will look so sad for just a flash before giving her that space inside her own head, because he has all the rest of her, doesn't he?

In her head, in every exchange, she twines a daisy-chain around his wrist and asks him to stay. 

 

_iv(a)._  
"I missed you when you died," he admits, and she answers, "Well, you died, too, once."

"Yeah, but I came back," he protests, and she smiles, touches his chin with the tips of her fingers. "So did I," she whispers, like it's a secret to be swallowed by the hitch of their shared laughter.

He winds his hand through her hair, and says, eyes shining, "So you did."

 

_iv(b)._  
She doesn't tell him about the worlds where he was gone, either killed by his own hand or by someone else's or never existing at all. Nor does she speak of the worlds where he turned into something ugly and dark, something worse than vengeance and sharper than pride. She doesn't tell him about the taste in her mouth when he bit her tongue, kissing her in a dimension where he asked her to watch entire countries fall at their feet.

"I jumped through fourteen different parallel worlds, and you said you loved me in each one," she tells him instead. He leans close, and in this tendril of reality, this tender offshoot of a tree that looms full of branches, he says the words that have never really mattered anyway.

Still, she does like to hear them.

 

_iv(c)._  
"Be seeing you," he mutters against her neck. The next morning, all she can do is hum the theme from _The Prisoner_ and muse over when exactly she'll be getting out of her own village by the sea.

 

_iv(d)._  
He cradles her like a child, like a father and a brother and a best friend and a lover, and even with all these faces, all these titles, all these names, he is still just the Doctor. She misses his singularity, the surety of him. The security and insecurity and incongruity.

She misses his pinstripes and his specs and his longer hair. The big ears, the leather coat, the eyes like melting ice.

"Let go, Rose," he urges, and he's split into two again, even here in this safe spot, the grass growing to snarl around her ankles as she struggles to make sense of what is going on. "Let me go." A hand steers her away and another hand pull her close and she cries because the hands feel the same but aren't and she isn't _stupid_ , she knows that they're--

"I can't," she shouts, "I can't let you go, I've never done, not since I met you, don't ask me to _now_ ," but he's pushing at her elbows even as she pulls at his collar, and she breaks through the haze of a daydream with all the elegance of an elephant crashing through a room full of china.

There is silence in her head for a very long while.

 

 

_v._

the truth is, all Rose _does_ is dream of the old life, and her head is full of all the things she has yet to realize. 

Like the fact that learning how to live like a human being again is harder than she thought it would be. The Doctor's not the only one figuring it all out. She needs to synchronize her body to a sleep schedule, needs to breathe around the burst inside that urges her to run, needs to look up at night and see what everyone else sees instead of what she thinks she knows. The solar system here is different, and the planets are like strangers. She needs to learn how to live with strangers. She needs to learn how to not call him a stranger.

There are books she could write, an autobiography that has yet to play out in words, and all she has to do is finally take hold of the pen with an honest sort of grip.

"New world," he says, wildness in his eyes, in his hair, in his smile. "New world, new life, new stories to to hear. New stories to _tell!_ "

He holds out his hand.

"What do you say, Rose Tyler?" he asks, and there are possibilities at his fingertips, waiting on his tongue.

**and happily ever after,**

she watches as the Doctor's eyelashes fall over his cheek, as he dozes fitfully next to her, stubble darkening his jaw and the vulnerable jut of his throat working as he whispers in his sleep.

"No spoilers," she says softly, brushing her hand over his lips. "New endings."

But more importantly, new beginnings.

Rose smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Reposted from LiveJournal.


End file.
